2024 Outlook with John O’Donnel of yieldHUB

yieldHUB is a SaaS company that provides yield management and comprehensive data analysis for semiconductor (IDMs and fabless) companies around the world. SemiWiki has been working with yieldHUB for the past three years doing blogs, webinars, and podcasts with great success. John O’Donnel spent 18 years at Analog Devices before founding yieldHUB in 2005. The last 18 years John has assembling a team of yield professionals all over the world.  yieldHUB is based in Ireland with employees located in Europe, the UK, the US, and Asia.

Tell us a little bit about your company.
We are an Irish company that was founded in 2005. yieldHUB provides a unique collaborative platform for semiconductor yield improvement and defect detection. We further differentiate ourselves by our speed of implementation, value for money, innovation and excellent customer support. Our customers range from large IDMs to fast-growing startups and SMEs around the world.

What was the most exciting high point of 2023 for your company?
There were several high points. This included achieving record processing speeds to ensure tens of thousands of datalogs could be processed into the database for a customer within a day. Also, exceeding 99.9% server availability across all our customers in the year. We attended several events including ITC.

What was the biggest challenge your company faced in 2023?
A challenge in 2023 was supporting and continuing to develop our current eponymous platform, while at the same time designing, resourcing and developing our next platform.

How is your company’s work addressing this biggest challenge?
We recruited more support engineers and data scientists and re-trained developers in the new technologies required for our next platform.

What do you think the biggest growth area for 2024 will be, and why?
In 2024, we anticipate that the biggest growth area for yieldHUB will be in automotive chip companies and in AI chip companies. We don’t just help them with yield improvement and defect detection, but also in sustainable manufacturing. Sustainability is a key topic at board level in every company, including in every semiconductor company. So improving the speed of test manufacturing is expected to be a high-growth area for us in 2024.

How is your company’s work addressing this growth?
We have been developing specific modules for analyzing test time, idle time and Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE).

What conferences did you attend in 2023 and how was the traffic?
In 2023, we attended a couple of GSA events including WISH. We exhibited at ITC (International Test Conference), PSECE, and events hosted by NMI (UK industry body) and MIDAS (Irish industry body). While foot traffic was somewhat lower than expected at ITC, our debut at PSECE in the Philippines garnered significant attention with high foot traffic. Follow us on LinkedIn and sign up to our newsletter for exclusive updates.

Will you attend conferences in 2024? Same or more?
Looking ahead to 2024, we are enthusiastic about attending and exhibiting at several global events, including those we participated in during 2023. Our commitment to these conferences remains strong as they provide us with invaluable opportunities to connect with industry peers, showcase our innovations, and stay at the forefront of semiconductor yield management.

 Final comments?
As we step into 2024, yieldHUB is primed for another year of innovation, growth, and service excellence. We thank our clients, partners, and team members for their unwavering support, and we look forward to further advancing the field of semiconductor yield management.

Also Read:

Must-attend webinar event: How better collaboration can improve your yield

It’s Always About the Yield

The Six Signs That You Need a Yield Management System